The Impact of Mobility Agent Based Micro Mobility on the Capacity of Wireless Access Networks

The rise in the number of mobile wireless devices accessing IP based communication networks has fuelled the need for efficient mobility support for seamless communication. As a consequence a profusion of mobility protocols were proposed. The mobility agent based family of protocols have risen in popularity due to the simplicity in implementing them compared to per host based protocols. The mobility agents located within wireless access networks hide the movement of the mobile nodes by acting as an anchor point through which all the packets traverses to and from the mobile node. The presence of these mobility agents will result in bottlenecks of high congestion within the access network. This paper provides a formal definition to study this effect of mobility agents on wireless access networks. Using maximum concurrent flow problem we model the access network as a multicommodity flow problem and study the throughput of the network with and without the presence of the mobility agents. From the results it can be confidently concluded that by implementing local mobility solutions based on agents, the wireless access network capacity is reduced and the number and location of the agents within the access network have direct impact on the loss.